Since the conservative exodus from Twitter and Facebook has begun, the liberal media has wrung its hands over Parler, an alternative to Big Tech platforms.
Parler’s downloads have spiked from 4.5 million to over 10 million just since the election, according to a November 17 report on Good Morning America. The report stated that some believe the spike is due to censorship on other apps.
The continual censorship of conservative voices on the major social media platforms has further polarized political discussions and enhanced the political division our country is experiencing. John Matze, Parler CEO, explained the situation:
“I think people are really just fed up with what’s going on on Twitter and Facebook and these other places that are really cracking down and trying to just interfere, I guess, with what people are trying to talk about during this time.”
Matze has also stated that “Many people feel abandoned and so they want to go somewhere where they’re not being manipulated.” The liberal media would have you believe that Parler is actually dangerous because there is no one telling you what is true and what is misinformation. With no one to eliminate the hate speech and conspiracy theories, you will quickly become radicalized, according to reports such as the one on Good Morning America.
But what about fact-checking? Shannon McGregor, assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and senior researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Good Morning America:
“One of the things that’s a bit concerning about a platform like Parler, where there’s not moderation, is that there’s no check on the misinformation, there’s no authoritative sources saying this information is incorrect.”
She concluded with a comment on how sites like Parler can radicalize users, saying, “What we’ve seen on other sites like this that don’t have a lot of moderation around information is that they can get extreme quite quickly.”
Despite these scary comments, Parler is not as dangerous as experts like McGregor make it out to be. An article on NPR summarized it succinctly:
“Parler's community guidelines bar criminal activity, terrorism, child pornography, copyright violations, fraud and spam. The company says it tries to avoid removing content or banning users and says it does not remove or filter content or accounts ‘on the basis of the opinion expressed within the content at issue.’"
Matze concludes: “We take a hard line against pornography and nudity. But if people disagree with one another, we’re not there to mediate or moderate the conversation.”
On a CNBC appearance, McGregor also indicated that she doesn’t believe that the moderation by social media giants has been biased. She claimed:
“There is just simply not the same amount of misinformation coming from the Democrats and the left in this country as there is right now from the right, and so it’s not going to be applied evenly because there’s just differences in the amounts of misinformation.”
Her conclusion in that appearance: “I don’t think that we’ve seen partisan bias in any of their decisions.”
Despite such claims, there is ample evidence to the contrary. For example, President Donald Trump has been censored by big tech 194 times to Joe Biden’s zero times between May 31, 2018 and November 16, 2020. Facebook shut down a “Stop the Steal” group, while allowing Antifa groups and the Shut Down DC group to stay. Twitter censored Trump yet allowed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to tweet mostly unencumbered. EventBrite shut down the “March for Trump” event, yet has allowed left-wing events. Even big tech CEOs at congressional hearings about the blatant bias shown in moderation efforts could not think of a single time that someone on the left had been censored.
To claim that Parler is a bigger danger than conventional social media, and that Big Tech is unbiased is disingenuous at best, and misleading at worst. Big Tech has allowed doxxing of people on the right and ostensibly humorous calls for violence. It has enabled far-left Antifa rioters and encouraged doxxers, yet failed to censor the left when they started compiling a targeted enemies list of people who worked for the Trump administration.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your local representative and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
